The new strip Robotman is another instance of a current trend among syndicates to develop a comic strip using a character which has already appeared in the merchandising arena. The character, Robotman, is involved in the toy field, and his design has been retained by young Jim Meddick who is writing and drawing the new strip. However, we want to emphasize the important fact that the specific human characteristics of the title character, as well as the supporting characters and their traits, have all been created by Jim Meddick. Jim is one of the youngest talents ever signed by the United Feature Syndicate.
Q: Where did Robotman come from, Jim?
Meddick: He started out in the licensing department -- as a character that came to the syndicate from England as a toy. United wanted to have a strip featuring him -- the design of the character was already established but the family setting and the other characters in the strip had to be created here.
Q: How did you happen to land the job of doing the strip?
Meddick: United had been looking at my strip Paperback Writer that I had designed in college. The strip won a contest conducted by the Chicago Tribune and the flew me to New York to tell me all about syndication. I decided to approach them with a revised version of Paperback Writer and also to submit the strip to other syndicates. When United Features saw it, they suggested changes and eventually got around to offering me a development contract. However, the things they wanted me to do in the changing of Paperback Writer weren't ones that I could feel comfortable with. At just about this time, the Robotman opportunity came up and I decided that I could work more easily with him. In the summer of 1984 Sarah Gillespie, the Managing Editor for Comics at United Media, discussed the idea with me of having Robotman in a family setting.
Q: Have you figured out any system for producing a flow of gags?
Meddick: Not yet. Usually ideas come to me just as I'm about to go to sleep at night. I'll wake up, turn on a light, write down the gag and then go back to sleep.
Q: Can you be a little more specific, Jim?
Meddick: I remember talking with Dayton Daily News editorial cartoonist, Mike Peters, about this. As you know, he's doing the new Mother Goose & Grimm strip in addition to his political cartoon work. Let's say that Mike's subject, at a particular gag session, was going to be "Women's Rights". He'd make a circle and with this subject in the center, draw spokes radiating out, and on these spokes he'd indicate as many visual ideas relating to "Women's Rights" as he could think of. These ideas might not relate directly to the subject but he might show a portrait of the Mona Lisa on one spoke for instance. With a number of different thoughts shown on the various spokes, Mike would try out combinations of very different ideas, mixing them together, and this process would often produce usable gags. I don't follow this process as consciously as Mike Peters does but I try to do somewhat the same thing in my mind. I try to think of a strange setting, or a strange circumstance, and hope to come up with gags from there. For instance, I was wondering during one gag session how a garage door opener would affect Robotman. This resulted in a strip where he's shown sitting in the living room reading. All of a sudden he's bounced violently up to the ceiling and then dropped on his head. In the final panel he's hollering out the door, "Hey, will you quit foolin' with the garage door opener."
Q: I know that you have a 9-to-5 job in the Art Department at United Media so I imagine that you do all of the work on the stirp at home.
Meddick: Yes -- I don't work on the strip here in the office. At home the drawing usually goes very quickly. As for getting ideas, I have a weight set in the basement and in the evenings or on weekends when I'm exercising, I may stop a routine, write some gags for awhile, and then go back to exercising. I generally set aside some time on weekends for drawing finishes of the strip. As you and I talk here in January, the strip is still in the prerelease stage -- I think it's set to make its debut on February 12th.
Q: Do you submit strips to Sarah Gillespie before you go ahead on the finish?
Meddick: Yes -- I show her roughs before going ahead with finishes. This particular strip is really being watched carefully by the syndicate because of the licensing aspects connected with it, I imagine. I feel at home with the character itself because I put his characteristics and personality together myself. After I started going on Robotman, the syndicate had suggestions as to how I might change him, but I told them that I felt at home with what I had developed and would like to keep it that way. Fortunately, they agreed. I could understand the syndicate's point of view -- they knew that it was going to be a character appearing in children's books, that it could walk on walls, and do stunts that would entertain children. I could see this as being something that would be great as a children's property but since it was going to be a comic strip also, I wanted it to appeal to an older market as well as to a children's market. So I try to go for the human elements in the character rather than for the machine elements in him. The toy is mechanical, and it also has a lot to do with music, and I don't include that element either. It was a record producer who created the toy -- he wrote songs for it, etc.
Q: Would you describe the characters you've come up with for the strip?
Meddick: Robotman himself is a naive character -- he has come into our world not knowing things that we take for granted. So he's a little bewildered. But he has very human characteristics that are familiar to all of us -- he's a lazy-type character who tries to avoid work -- as does his friend, the boy Oscar who's about 8. Oscar has an older brother, Gary, who's probably a junior in high school. I feel like I'm some kind of an authority on relationships such as theirs because I'm the youngest in a family of five boys. I've made Gary as a sort of collective of all my older brothers. Sometimes I almost get carried away with the idea of producing gags based on the younger-older brother theme, but since the strip features Robotman, I make a point of having him in all the jokes. The parents of the boys also appear in the strip but they're not emphasized very much. The father is an executive at any IBM-type corporation -- although he's sort of the absentminded professor type also. He commits boo-boos in everyday affairs but he's very smart in science.
Q: Where did the inspiration to get into cartooning come from in your case, Jim? Was it in reading or copying newspaper comic strips or stories in comic books?
Meddick: No -- I think it came from watching animated cartoons on Saturday morning TV. I might say that I did collect a lot of Johnny Hart's B.C. books. Later on, I liked Doonesbury for the writing it contained. At the time I was watching animated cartoons, I'd do lengthy story-type comic books using humorous characters of my own creation. One of the first of them was a bum who lived in the gutter and had various adventures with his cat.
Q: I believe you majored in Fine Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, didn't you?
Meddick: Yes -- and I did a strip for four years for a student newspaper. I had two years of basic drawing and design, and then majored for two years in illustration.
Q: At what point did the Chicago Tribune cartoon contest come into your picture?
Meddick: In my senior year. Several things led up to this. My college strip called Temporary Insanity featured a basic student character. I showed this to Mike Peters, whom I mentioned earlier, and he sent it to David Hendin, the Editorial Director here at United. United sent me a long note saying they they liked the writing and the art but that the subject matter of a student-oriented strip wasn't right for the current market. So I came up with a Roman strip called Toga some time later but was told that this wouldn't work either. At this point I decided to take one of my student characters and make him a free-lance writer. This -- Paperback Writer -- was what I submitted to the Tribune contest.
Q: How many strips of Paperback Writer did you have to submit to the Tribune?
Meddick: About a dozen I believe. This was in 1983, by the way. During the summer after graduation I developed this strip further, but finally they said they didn�t think certain characters would work, and they suggested a lot of changes. I sent this strip to others, including United, and at this point I met Sarah Gillespie and then became aware of the Robotman opportunity. The syndicate was trying out several artists on Robotman. I did a week�s worth of strips as a free-lance job for which I charged the syndicate. I guess they liked the results because they came back to me with a development contract. Development contracts don�t pay enough to provide an entire living so I asked if there were any job openings in the art department. They hired me � which obviously helped a lot!
Q: Since you majored in �Illustration,� you believe that being able to draw helps, even though there are strips currently being published which don�t feature particularly great drawing. But when you were trying to choose a college, you looked for something besides art, didn�t you?
Meddick: I looked for an art school and a university combined. At Washington U. I took a lot of literature courses, art history, etc. The fact that you�re taking courses, reading, getting outside information and learning how to write is very important.
Q: I know you think that reading is very important for the strip artist.
Meddick: I think you can�t emphasize it enough, and it helps if you watch intelligent comedy on TV, not mindlessly, but noting how they�re constructing the jokes, and how they�re setting people up for the gags. Watching Bob Newhart�s program last night, I could see they had strung together sequences which could have been comic strips, although they were involved with a bigger, larger narrative. Analyzing all these things helps the comic strip artist.
Q: What does your 9-to-5 work at the syndicate include, Jim?
Meddick: I do a political cartoon each week for the Newspaper Enterprise Association. As you well know, NEA and the United Feature Syndicate are part of the United Media Enterprises.
Q: I know that you�ve already received national recognition on The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour. And I know you�ve been quoted as saying that you see Robotman as a bridge between technology and the people who are having trouble feeling comfortable with it. And that Robotman humanizes the computer, giving people everywhere a chance to relate to the hardware. Speaking of The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, how do they make use of cartoons?
Meddick: Each Friday they pick some political cartoons of the week and have various voices speaking the words which the characters in the cartoons are saying. MacNeil/Lehrer subscribes to the NEA service which is how they picked the cartoons of mine which they�ve used.
Q: Thanks for this very interesting account, Jim.